Eva Nogales

Eva Nogales (born May 16, 1965) is a Spanish-American biophysicist at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and a professor at the University of California, Berkeley, where she served as head of the Division of Biochemistry, Biophysics and Structural Biology of the Department of Molecular and Cell Biology (2015–2020). She is a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator.

Nogales is a pioneer in using electron microscopy for the structural and functional characterization of macromolecular complexes. She used electron crystallography to obtain the first structure of tubulin and identify the binding site of the important anti-cancer drug taxol. She is a involved in work combining cryo-EM, computational image analysis and biochemical assays to gain insights into function and regulation of biological complexes and molecular machines. Her work has uncovered aspects of cellular function that are relevant to the treatment of cancer and other diseases.

Early life and education Eva Nogales obtained her BS degree in physics from the Autonomous University of Madrid in 1988. She later earned her PhD from the University of Keele in 1992 while working at the Synchrotron Radiation Source under the supervision of Joan Bordas. She became an assistant professor in the Department of Molecular and Cell Biology at the University of California, Berkeley in 1998. In 2000 she became an investigator in the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. As cryo-EM techniques became more powerful, she became a leader in applying cryo-EM to the study of microtubule structure and function and other large macromolecular assemblies such as eukaryotic transcription and translation initiation complexes, the polycomb complex PRC2, and telomerase.

Selected publications

Awards 2000: investigator, Howard Hughes Medical Institute 2005: Early Career Life Scientist Award, American Society for Cell Biology 2006: Chabot Science Award for Excellence 2015: Dorothy Crowfoot Hodgkin Award, Protein Society 2015: Elected as a member of the US National Academy of Sciences 2016: Elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences 2018: Women in Cell Biology Award (Senior), American Society for Cell Biology 2019: Grimwade Medal for Biochemistry. 2021: AAAS Fellows Award. 2023: Shaw Prize in Life Sciences. 2025: Foreign Member of the Royal Society.

Personal life Nogales is married to Howard Padmore and they have two children.